The forefront research facilities of high energy physics are colliding beam accelerators. These machines provide the highest achievable interaction energies. Professor Lankford's research has exploited colliders at CERN, SLAC, Fermilab, and others.

At SLAC, Professor Lankford's group is part of the BaBar Collaboration, which studies the origins of the non-conservation of charge-parity quantum numbers. This investigation is based upon high-statistics studies of the properties of bottom quarks in electron-positron collisions at the B-factory PEP-II.

At CERN, Professor Lankford was deputy director of the ATLAS Experiment — a key experiment in the confirmation of Higgs boson.

Professor Lankford's research at colliders has largely focused on studies of the properties of heavy quarks and leptons and on electroweak physics. His studies utilize the detection of leptons as harbingers of rare and interesting physics processes. In addition, he develops new particle detection techniques and electronics systems for his experiments.